Project Team

Lebanidze Bidzina

Image: Lebanidze Bidzina

Dr. Bidzina Lebanidze

Project Leader and Principal Investigator

Dr. Bidzina Lebanidze is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Slavic Studies and Caucasus Studies. His research interests include EU Foreign and Security Policy, International Relations and Global Governance.

Email: bidzina.lebanidze@uni-jena.de 

Diana Forker

Image: Diana Forker

Prof. Dr. Diana Forker

Project Leader and Principal Investigator

Research areas of Prof. Dr. Diana Forker include East Caucasian (Nakh-Daghestanian) and West Caucasian languages, grammatical description and functional linguistics sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology as well as language typology and areal linguistics.

Email: diana.forker@uni-jena.de 

Tiffany Williams

Image: Tiffany Williams

Dr. Tiffany G. Williams

Postdoctoral Researcher

Tiffany G. Williams is a postdoctoral researcher in the “Resilience in the South Caucasus: prospects and challenges of a new EU foreign policy concept” project. Her postdoctoral work focuses on resilience in EU-funded public administration support initiatives implemented in the South Caucasus. She earned her PhD at Universität Wien while a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the Institut für Höhere Studien, and earned a Master of Public Administration at Cornell University.

Email: tiffany.williams@uni-jena.de

Veronika Pfeilschifter

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Veronika Pfeilschifter

Doctoral Researcher

Veronika Pfeilschifter is a social scientist and doctoral researcher at the Institute for Caucasus Studies at Friedrich Schiller University Jena and at the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) Berlin. Her doctoral project, preliminarily entitled “Ideology, Concepts, and Emotions: Taking Stock of the New Left in the South Caucasus”, examines left-wing subjects in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, in particular, from the early 2000s until today.

Email: v.pfeilschifter@uni-jena.de 

Irena Gonashvili

Image: Jens Meyer (University of Jena)

Irena Gonashvili-Münch

Doctoral Researcher

Irena Gonashvili-Münch holds the Master’s degree in Political Sciences from the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena and the Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University.
Ms. Gonashvili-Münch is the doctoral researcher in the project and is researching the Europeanization of the waste management policy in Georgia and Armenia.

Email: irena.gonashvili@uni-jena.de

Aliaksandra Baryieva

Image: Aliaksandra Baryieva

Aliaksandra Baryieva

Student Assistant

Aliaksandra Baryieva is a Master's student in English and American Studies at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Her main research interests include corpus linguistics and discourse analysis.

Within the JENA-CAUC project, she supports the team with editing, proofreading, and website content management.

Email: aliaksandra.baryieva@uni-jena.de